


Excerpts from “A Persian Carpet: The lost memoir of the real Lord Henry” (With notes from the Editors)

by hangingfire



Category: The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
Genre: 19th Century, Academia, M/M, Memoirs, Metafiction, Queer Victorians, Unreliable Narrator, Victorian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-17
Updated: 2014-12-17
Packaged: 2018-03-01 22:24:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 7,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2789849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hangingfire/pseuds/hangingfire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Scholars have long assumed that Lord Henry Warren was the prototype of Oscar Wilde’s ‘Lord Henry Wotton’ in <i>The Picture of Dorian Gray</i>, and that he may have known more about the mysterious disappearance of his friend, painter Basil Holland (the known antecedent of Wilde’s ‘Basil Hallward’), than he ever admitted in his life.” A bit of metafictional fun with <i>The Picture of Dorian Gray</i>, imagining that its characters were based on Wilde's own contemporaries, and that one of them wrote a secret tell-all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Introduction

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thegirlwiththemouseyhair](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegirlwiththemouseyhair/gifts).



> I am too fond of reading books to care to write them, Mr. Erskine. I should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal.
> 
> —Lord Henry Wotton, _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ by Oscar Wilde. Published by Ward, Lock, & Co., 1891.

Rumours of a scandalous secret memoir by Lord Henry Warren began to surface not long after his death in 1912. His sister, Lady Gwendolen Fairfield, claimed in a 1913 letter to her close friend, the Duchess of Monmouth[1], that her brother:

> until the day he died was engaged in a _most secret_ work, of which he scarcely admitted even to me and certainly not to our brother [Charles, fourth Duke of Torbay]! He was never without his writing-slope[2] those last few years, you know, and I used to tease him saying I’d never in my life seen him with a pen in his hand and nor had even his classmates at Oxford and Eton but he never seemed to like my saying so. I only glimpsed once the papers he concealed in the box of the writing-slope, and after he died it was nowhere to be _found_! And no one would answer for it, not even [his nephew, second son of Duke Charles] Andrew, who of course was thick as thieves with the old reprobate (the only one of the family who was in the end, I daresay). Andrew keeps his own counsel and while I suspect he will never give Harry away, I am sure he knows what became of the writing-slope and its contents.[3]

We know now that Lady Gwendolen was correct and that Lord Andrew Warren was entrusted with his uncle’s secret memoir, and notes amongst Lord Andrew’s own personal papers suggest that he was sworn to conceal these matters until all parties mentioned in the memoir—which is to say, everyone of Lord Henry’s own generation—had passed away. Following Andrew Warren’s tragic death at Passchendaele in 1917, however, the memoir was forgotten. His widow Lilias, six months pregnant with their only child and suddenly in deep in debt, was forced to sell many of her husband’s effects, including Lord Henry Warren’s writing-slope.

The writing-slope, though of fine Italian manufacture, was in poor condition by this time, which may explain why it languished for many years in the back of a London antique-shop. It might have stayed there forever but for the efforts of Ms Cecily Warren, great-granddaughter of Andrew. Ms Warren’s interest in her family history led her to trace the sale of her great-grandfather’s possessions, efforts which in due course led her to the store where her thrice-great uncle’s lost papers awaited rediscovery.

That this discovery has created a controversy is, perhaps, one of the great understatements of the decade. Ms Warren has been accused of perpetrating a fraud, a charge she continues to vehemently deny, and against which we, the Editors of this volume, also stand, in light of the enormous efforts that have been devoted to the authentication of the papers.

Scholars have long assumed that Lord Henry Warren was the prototype of Oscar Wilde’s “Lord Henry Wotton” in _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ , and that he may have known more about the mysterious disappearance of his friend, painter Basil Holland (the known antecedent of Wilde’s “Basil Hallward”), than he ever admitted in his life. Warren’s writings confirm that the former is almost certainly true, but that he was as troubled and mystified by the latter as anyone in his day.

The most fascinating aspect of Warren’s memoir is the considerable extent to which it correlates with Wilde’s novel, which has been one of the reasons for the charges of fraud. However, extenuating evidence suggests that versions of many of the novel’s key events were related to Wilde by witnesses—for example, by Basil Holland via written correspondence in at least two known cases[4]—and it appears that he appropriated several views and epigrams that Warren was known to have stated in general conversation. Naturally, a considerable amount of poetic license was certainly taken with regard to events that he could not have possibly seen himself, and we need not discuss the obvious implausibility of the novel’s more fantastical elements. We must also bear in mind that Warren was writing his memoir two decades after _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ was published; the book was by then both famous and notorious, and it appears to have amused Warren to make frequent reference to it. Nevertheless, the general outline of Wilde’s story does seem to have been provided by events in the lives of Warren and Holland.

There are those who accuse Lord Henry Warren of being a cut-rate English Decadent and a chronic name-dropper, charges often levelled against him in his own day. It is more charitable, perhaps, to see in him an intelligent mind that never found its true vocation, and which instead was frittered away on drawing-room epigrams and the theatre of high society. His memoir also provides a view into the private life of a man who in our modern terms we would describe as bisexual and homoromantic, but who would no doubt have dismissed such labels as lacking in both poetry and imagination.

There are also tantalising hints regarding the true identity of the young man who was the subject of a known and now lost work by Basil Holland, which was seen by many visitors to his studio and which provided the inspiration for Wilde’s novel. Some speculate that this man was John Gray, poet and later priest; others, in apparent defiance of chronology, have assigned Dorian Gray’s origins to Lord Alfred Douglas, notwithstanding that Wilde and Douglas did not meet until two years _after_ the first version of _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ appeared in _Lippincott’s_. The “Dorian” named in Warren’s memoirs corresponds to neither of these men, but as Warren chose—for reasons best known to himself—to use Wilde’s name for the beautiful young man of Holland’s lost portrait, the mystery remains.

—The Editors

***

**NOTE** : What follows are excerpts. The complete text is available in a single volume from Oxford University Press.

We have kept Warren’s rather disingenuously obscured references to years. Where appropriate, additional informational notes have been included as footnotes in the text.

—The Editors

***

[1] The Duchess was one of the few women who stood by Lady Gwendolen in her notorious disgrace in 1886, possibly due to the Duchess’s own personal—albeit much quieter—scandals.

[2] A portable cabinet with a fold-out writing surface, a space for papers, and holders for ink and pens (see Figure 1.1).

[3] Letter from Lady Gwendolen Fairfield to Sarah, Duchess of Monmouth, June 14, 1913.

[4] See also _The Collected Letters of Basil Holland_ , Oxford University Press, 2010.


	2. Peintre fier de mon génie [1]

Basil’s lodgings at Oxford were adjacent to my own and like me, he was reading Greats—though in his case only nominally, painting being his true passion; he had narrowly escaped the Army career his father wanted for him and was putting off further paternal ire by immersing himself in study. We met at some sherry-party or other, where I couldn’t help noticing him for the simple fact that alone of all the young men, he seemed never to laugh at anything I said. My chiefest desires being to amuse or to shock, I was intrigued, as it appeared that this dark, roughly handsome, silent young man felt neither emotion.

I introduced myself and enquired as to whether he was enjoying himself. “Not particularly,” he admitted, “but it has been very interesting to watch you hold forth. Though I don’t think you believe half of what you are saying, do you?”

Far from being affronted, I found myself charmed by his bluntness and the odd trick he had of tossing his head back when he felt he was expressing some manner of defiance. We talked long into the night, and we were soon quite inseparable. It was not long into our friendship that I learned that woman delighted him not, and subsequent to this discovery it seemed inevitable that we should soon find ourselves on the most intimate of terms.[2] 

How strange it seems sometimes, that we were friends for so long. So many of the finest artists are dreadfully pedestrian people when you come to know them well. All Basil’s fire was in his art; in his life, he was timid and anxious and terribly predictable, though he told anyone who would listen how independent his nature was. He lived in a kind of hazy dread of discovery while at the same time was consumed with an unbecoming possessiveness, both of which eventually drove him to break off certain elements of our relationship, though we remained good friends; I liked his art too well to give him up. He took it very hard when I married Victoria—which I did more out of a sense of obligation than romance, it must be admitted, though her grand passions, like banners in the wind, were always amusing—and it was some months before we regularly saw one another at our clubs and favourite galleries and I resumed my visits to his studio. 

It was in the course of one of those visits in the summer of 187– that I first met the young man known as Dorian Gray. By then, Basil’s talents, long in the bud, were in full blossom. The works of Whistler and Sargent were fripperies by comparison, and of the previous month or so, everyone had noticed a new vitality in his work. Some rumours suggested a new _inamorata_ in his life, linking him particularly to a niece of Lady Brandon’s—a ridiculous suggestion for more than one reason! Basil was too romantic to marry, and besides, as those of us closest to him were perfectly well aware, he sought a Jonathan, not a Bathsheba.

That Jonathan, as it transpired, was Dorian. The June day on which I met him would have been notable alone for the riot of flowers that year, flowers that filled Basil’s garden with perfume of unparalleled richness and colours that made Oriental silks look sickly and wan. Amongst these flowers Dorian was a creature of primrose and ivory. The classical figures for whom he had modeled—Paris[3], Narcissus, Adonis—were mere caricatures of the young man who pouted so prettily in Basil’s studio. Only Basil’s magnificent portrait showed him as he truly was—or at least, as Basil wished him to be. And perhaps at first, those were the same things.

In Dorian’s presence, Basil was at once a sailor before a Siren and a Ladon in the Hesperides. Such an absorption in another human could not, I thought, end well, neither for the painter nor the boy. Basil would have quite literally built a labyrinth around him had he the means, and it seemed to me that Dorian (who was too young then to have learned taste) was beginning to see in Basil less a friend and an artist than a willing sycophant. His personality was then so gloriously unformed, and he had hungers for life of which he was scarcely aware. So what else was I to do but to speak to him as well as I knew how?

I suppose Oscar must have heard of the scene that ensued from Basil, for he certainly heard none of it from me, and Dorian never liked to speak of it afterward.[4] It is true that I spoke to Dorian of the importance of living fully and of the evanescence of youth in the way that only a young man who fancies himself jaded can do—ah! such naïvete; I charm myself in hindsight. And the boy became quite overwrought, to Basil’s dismay and my own sorrow. I felt I ought to get him away from Basil, to allow tempers to cool and for the both of them to wipe off the greasepaint of their moods; the boy’s sudden attachment to me was the least of my concerns! To be sure, I was flattered by his admiration—there is not a man alive who is incapable of feeling victorious in the warm light of another’s fond regard. And only the most withered of souls would be immune to such beauty.

However, Basil was quite cross with me, though I didn’t realise the extent at the time. Afterward, we saw less of each other in private, and it seems that he and Dorian saw less of one another as well. There was no true break, but the elegant tragedy that resulted from Dorian’s romance with the music-hall actress known as Sybil Vane seems to have been a turning-point for Basil, in his relations with Dorian and in his relations with me. We were still friends, of course; I was always glad to call him a friend. But as Dorian lived more and more avidly, there were times when we spent entire weeks in one another's company, and thus there was less time for Basil in either of our lives.

  


***

[1] Charles Baudelaire, “Rêve Parisien”. "Painter, proud of my genius." In lieu of chapter headings, Warren used quotations from Baudelaire’s _Les fleurs du mal_ , a hand-bound edition of which, won as a school prize, was one of his most prized belongings.

[2] Figure 3.1 shows an explicit pencil sketch of a nude man drawn by Holland during his Oxford days. The man’s face is deliberately obscured, but scholars are in general agreement that Warren was the model.

[3] See Figure 3.2, “Paris In Slumber”.

[4] A fragment of a letter found amongst Wilde’s papers suggests that Wilde’s source may have been “Dorian Gray” himself. The text that remains is missing both the first page and a signature, but it recounts the scene in a manner very similar to Wilde’s narrative, and the handwriting does not match Holland’s. However, some scholars argue that this is instead a fragment of an abandoned first draft of what would have been an epistolary novel. 


	3. Hypocrite lecteur! [1]

Oscar arrived in London society in 188–, with all the grace of a stone falling into a mill-pond. He was soon quite omnipresent; it was with a faint sigh of relief that we watched him sail to America, and we rather hoped he would enjoy the Americans so much as to remain with them. But he returned, more famous than ever, a Juggernaut in lilies and velvet.

I would not have expected Basil to enjoy his company, and yet enjoy it he did, and Basil’s portrait of Mrs Wilde[2] caused a minor sensation when it appeared. And Dorian—well, Dorian was entirely taken with the man. Because of that, I believe I saw rather more of Oscar than either of us would have preferred, for Dorian wished to have us both in his company at all times. More than once I half-suspected certain hostesses of conspiring to sell tickets to the dinners at which Oscar and I would be in attendance. I cannot say it is particularly gratifying to have been seen as a side-show, but nor can I deny that I enjoyed it. Oscar was a rare rival, and the finest drawing-room enemy one could have chosen. 

I recall an evening when Dorian and Basil came to dine at Curzon Street, along with Oscar and his wife. The conversation over dinner was remarkable—which is to say it was largely unremarkable in that paradoxes were posed, epigrams launched like rockets, and opinions shaken out like bed-linens, and thus a typical sort of dinner for those in attendance. Dorian and Basil remained after the other guests had departed—and I recall it because there seemed, those days, to be so few evenings when all three of us were together.

“I know you do not like Oscar,” Basil said to me, while Dorian reclined on a couch, seeming to ignore us in favour of Mallarmé’s “L’après-midi d’un faune”. “But you need not be so hard on his wife. Victoria rather likes her, and though she can be quiet, she is really very intelligent.”

“Is she?” I said. “Then I must alter my opinion of Oscar, for an intelligent wife is the clearest sign of a foolish husband.” 

“That is unkind, and I don’t believe you mean it,” Basil replied. 

Before I could answer, Dorian looked up from his book. “Oscar is not foolish, Harry,” he said. “And you know that perfectly well; you have said that you have not got a single enemy who is a fool.”

“You have caught me on the horns of my own paradoxes,” I said, laughing. “Very well; I own that Oscar is no fool, and I own that his wife must have her charms, even if she is a partisan of dress reform.”

“Gracious as ever, Harry,” Basil said dryly. “I know you don’t care for women very much, but you mustn’t direct your opinions against the entire sex against each individual member in turn.”

“On the contrary, I like women very much. They are so practical, so charming—”

And here Dorian interrupted, “And decorative, are they not? The triumph of matter over mind.”

“Are you Harry’s understudy now, Dorian, that you speak his lines for him?” asked Basil, raising an eyebrow.

Dorian flushed scarlet. “Basil, now you are being unkind. I cannot help liking what Harry says, and if I repeat it, it is merely an accident.”

Basil glanced away for a moment, his own face flushing, and I thought I heard him murmur something that sounded like “And what I say?” Then he looked back at Dorian, a brittle smile on his face. “What of Oscar? Do you like what he says?”

Dorian, wide-eyed, glanced at me, and sounding like a schoolboy caught sneaking off during chapel, said, “I do. But I like that he listens, too.”

“Oscar listens?” I said, and I was quite unable to suppress a laugh. “He must do so only in search of arrows for his own quiver.”

“Yes—no, it isn’t like that,” Dorian said. He flushed again, and I wondered at his seeming embarrassment. He stammered a little as he went on. “Yes, he listens to what people say, and sometimes he makes a note of it and a turn of phrase may appear in one of his stories afterward. But he listens to people when they tell him their stories. And he asks questions, and he truly understands what you are saying to him, or tries to.”

“And you say that neither Harry nor I listen? Or understand?” Basil asked.

“I didn’t say that!” the boy exclaimed, and for a moment he looked as if he might weep.

“Oh, you two are being absurd again!” I said. I was not going to let Oscar continue to intrude _in absentia_. “I absolutely forbid you to continue to be absurd. Come, let us venture out and clear our heads.”

“You may go,” Basil said, rising. “I am sorry, Harry, and Dorian. I am very tired, and I have not the head for wine that I once did. I shall see you both soon, I hope.” And with that, he went out. A little later, Dorian and I went out to visit a particular friend in Fitzroy Street[3], and thus the evening came to an end.

  


***

[1] Charles Baudelaire, “Au lecteur”. "Hypocrite reader!"

[2] This portrait was lost in the sale of Wilde’s belongings after his conviction, but was described by Wilde in a letter to his mother as “a work of extraordinary sensitivity and delicacy, a modern Botticelli”.

[3] Possibly a reference to Alfred Taylor, a known procurer of male prostitutes and who was convicted, along with Wilde, of gross indecency.


	4. C’est que la Mort, planant comme un soleil nouveau, fera s’épanouir les fleurs de leur cerveau! [1]

By the autumn of 188–, I was seeing little of Basil. He had gone thoroughly High Church by then—all the way to Rome, as was the fashion in those days. His subject matter had followed suit—oh, the saints and martyrs that took the place of his earlier Hellenic ideals! It was in the midst of this metamorphosis that he came to confront me over my poor sister Gwendolen’s indiscretions.

Gwendolen was one of those rare ladies who sees the opera as an opportunity for music rather than gossip, and on that account alone I had imagined she and Dorian would get on well. And so they did, and Fairfield never suspected a thing. Though I could not help but be aware of certain matters, I was not privy to what passed between them; generally, when I spent time with Dorian in the company of women, it was only the most interesting of women, and they are hardly acceptable in the polite society to which Gwendolen belonged until her unfortunate downfall. 

Of the details that were rehearsed and performed in the court all are well aware—that she was caught _in flagrante_ by her husband at Hetherington’s country estate with a footman and a game-keeper. That alone was enough for a divorce, but to fully understand the opprobrium in which the poor girl was held and the reasons for which her husband refused to let the children live with her, one must know of the vile whispers that passed in the refined tea-rooms and salons of the upper orders. They spoke of certain “unnatural” relations, of opium and debasement. These scurrilous charges Gwendolen would neither confess to nor deny; instead she withdrew into a kind of _purdah_ , until she went away from England for a time in the company of a cousin.[2]

But as to Basil’s visit: it was an afternoon in October, and I had recently received a splendid cockatoo[3], and was attending to it in my library at the house on Curzon Street, when the butler announced Basil. I was more than happy to receive him; he, on the other hand, seemed less than pleased. He was pale and had grown thin, and I was startled to see his dark curls were now shot through with silver.

“Basil, my dear fellow! How wonderful to see you!” I said, and moved to take his hand. He seemed to flinch from my touch, then clasped my hand with his own cold hand.

“I wish I could say the same, Harry,” he said, his voice low and thick with misery. He sat down on the chair and drew out and handkerchief, which he passed across his brow and promptly began to worry in his hands. “How is Gwendolen?”

I looked at him in some surprise. Basil had always been polite to Gwendolen, and I don’t think he disliked her, but he certainly had never asked after her welfare except to her face. “I daresay that if she would, she would take the veil,” I said. “But I do not think that Rome would welcome her.”

“Rome welcomes all sorts, Harry, if they come in true repentance. But you wouldn’t know that.” He passed a hand over his face. “You must know what they are saying about her. For God’s sake, Harry, don’t you understand? Your sister’s name has become a by-word for female vice and—” here he broke off, wringing at his handkerchief so hard I thought he might tear it. His next words he spoke as if they were tortured forth. “Vice, and—Sapphic behaviour.”

I poured him a drink then, but he did not accept it. “Gwendolen is many things, Basil, but a poet she is not.”

“My God, Harry! How can you joke?”

“Basil, you may as well ask how I can not,” I replied. “I am sorry for her, and I am sorry too for Fairfield and the children. You must understand, I have spent the last fortnight convincing our brother not to wholly disown her! We will send her away to the continent, where I imagine she will be quite fashionable, as long as there are no Englishmen or Englishwomen about. Don’t scowl like that. You must know that if I make light, it is not because my concern is any less. I merely act as is expected of me.”

“You need not pose around me, Harry, for I know you too well,” he said.

“And that is why I must pose all the more.”

Basil shook his head and took his drink then. “There are those who blame Dorian Gray, Harry.”

Here I was genuinely taken by surprise. As far as I knew, any liaison between my sister and Dorian had come to an end some time ago. “How on earth do they arrive at that conclusion? I have heard about the business with Lady Whitmore’s daughter and the Lascar sailor, and everyone knows about the footman and the game-keeper, but Dorian? Why, they have not seen one another outside the opera for ages, and he had nothing to do with either of those incidents.”

“Don’t claim to be ignorant about the talk around Dorian.” He went on then at some length then, and what he said here will be known to anyone who has read Oscar’s book; he must have been rehearsing that catalogue of Dorian’s sins[4] as if it were Hamlet’s soliloquy. Of course, I knew that all that and more was on the tongues of London society, as if those ladies and gentlemen had never seen or committed a single vice. There are those who said that I encouraged Dorian. If an injunction to live, to engage the senses always, and to burn, as Pater wrote, “with a hard, gem-like flame” is encouragement, then I most certainly encouraged him. I was his friend, and I stood by him always, but I did not dictate his actions. What he did out of my company was his own affair. 

Finally Basil exhausted himself. He took a long drink then and looked at me with a pleading expression. “I wish you would talk to him, Harry.”

“I have talked to him.”

“Of course you have,” he said with heavy sigh. “And I see what effect it has had, which is to say, none at all—but I should not be surprised, for you never moralise. You will perplex and provoke, but there is no moral guidance in you. I shall have to see him myself.”

“Do that,” I said, with some heat, for by then I was finding Basil’s newfound sanctimony quite wearying. “Perhaps he shall listen to you, though you may have to promise to paint him another portrait to replace the one he has lost. Do that and you shall have him to yourself for hours at a time and you may preach as you paint.”

“That portrait! I wish to God I had never painted that portrait.” Basil was on his feet then, and I thought for a moment he might storm out right then. “I am done with portraits, Harry,” he said. “I should much rather paint other things. Do you recall Waterhouse’s _St Eulalia_?”

“I have tried to forget it.”

“Say what you will, but I wish I had painted that. I would rather have painted a hundred saints and martyrs than Dorian Gray.”

“You don’t mean that, Basil.”

“I do.” He called then for his hat and coat. “I am sorry to have troubled you, Harry. I thought you would understand—or even that you might realise what you had done—that with your words and your damned influence you have shaped Dorian Gray as surely as a sculptor molds his clay. But you are a bad artist, Harry.”

“Then I suppose I must content myself with a genius for living instead,” I replied. I ought not to have said more, but I was quite angry with Basil by this point, and such emotion spurs us to sweat and foam where we ought to draw back to a slower gait, and I galloped onward: “At least I have that,” I said, “but you have never had any, and now you have lost your genius for art as well.”

Basil said no more, but left, and I never saw him again. Regret ought to be a luxury, but in this matter it is as bitter as the waters of Marah. I wrote to him the next day, but he did not answer. Shortly thereafter he vanished altogether—to Paris, they said, though none could ever prove that they saw him there. 

That Oscar took this sensational occasion as the turning-point for his novel is a thing for which I shall never forgive him. This is not a thing I write lightly; sometimes I do astound myself with my own sincerity. His satire of me, his various cunningly-concealed libels and stolen confections of this phrase or that—I will take them as a compliment, though many take them as condemnation to this very day. But his treatment of Basil was bad, very bad indeed, and all the more shocking for the fact that Basil was a close friend of Oscar’s own wife. Basil’s disappearance was quite dreadful enough at the time—the interviews with the police, the endless gossip. It very nearly overshadowed my own divorce.[5] When Oscar’s tale appeared in _Lippincott’s_ , it only stoked the flames of notoriety higher and higher still, until I too had to leave England for a time, or else be altogether immolated.

Even then I would have asked Dorian to accompany me, but by then, he too had vanished. I saw him last on a cold March night[6], he and I both possessed of some queer mood. He spoke of a desire to become virtuous, and his dread that Basil might have been murdered—two things that I could not credit. When I called on him the next day, his man said he had left in the night, leaving no note. Soon after, rumours began to spread. Some said that he had been found dead in some low den; others that he was murdered by thieves who invaded his Mayfair home. There were stranger tales too—but I need not elaborate. What truly became of him mattered not, for he too was now as one dead. And this disappearance too was in the end yet more fodder for Oscar and his “decadent” little book.

  


***

[1] Charles Baudelaire, “Le mort des artistes”. "It is that death, hovering like a new sun, will blossom the flowers of their brains!"

[2] The cousin was Sarah, Duchess of Monmouth, who was only too happy to go abroad with Lady Gwendolen to escape gossip about her own extramarital liaisons.

[3] Possibly the original of the “Java parrot” to which Wilde refers in the novel. Wilde was many things, but not an ornithologist.

[4] The passage beginning “It is not much to ask of you, Dorian, and it is entirely for your own sake that I am speaking. I think it right that you should know that the most dreadful things are being said against you in London.” 

[5] Warren brought a divorce suit against his wife on the grounds of adultery, and during the proceedings, certain of his own indiscretions came to light. Prosecutable evidence could have been brought against him, but this eventuality was averted by a surprisingly rapid settlement. At least one historian has suggested that the entire case was a sort of melodrama arranged by the Warrens to bring their marriage to a mutually desired end and avoid more dangerous scandal, though absent solid proof of such a conspiracy, this seems far-fetched.

[6] In _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ , Lord Henry Wotton in his last scene with Dorian Gray says, “I don't think there have been such lilacs since the year I met you.” One must assume that this was yet another instance of poetic license on Wilde’s part. Even when taking the text of the novel on its own terms, the chronology is curious; Basil Hallward’s murder occurs in November, and Lord Henry later speaks of the disappearance being the talk of society for six weeks. Even assuming a month lapse between Hallward’s murder and the beginning of the gossip, it would seem that this scene occurs rather early for lilacs.


	5. Les miroirs ternis et les flammes mortes [1]

I lived abroad until 189–; when I returned to England, Oscar’s star was approaching its zenith. His novel remained subject of some chatter, but society can only handle a few scandals at a time, and others had become more interesting. Shortly after I returned, _The Green Carnation_ was published,[2] and I confess to having felt pleasure in knowing that Oscar himself had been thoroughly lampooned in his own turn. I had no hand in it, contrary to a number of accusations that were made at the time. I admit that I should have been very pleased to have done so.

Of Oscar’s downfall little can be said, save that whatever I may have felt about the man, I would not have wished that fate upon him. When his absurd row with Queensberry led to his arrest, I did what he would not, and departed for the continent.[3] There I remained for several years, returning to England in 19–.

In the autumn of 189–, I was in Paris. I did not know that Oscar was living there at the time; I cannot say whether I would have deliberately sought him out or if I would have chosen to avoid him completely had I known. It matters not; circumstances conspired to bring us together at a café in St-Germain-des-Prés.

It was by his voice I recognised him; before he spoke, I glanced in his direction and saw nothing familiar in the aged, possibly ill figure; and the waiter addressed him familiarly as “M’sieur Melmoth”. But when he answered, I knew that the man at the table next to me was Oscar. How his years in prison and in exile had altered him! He looked like a man at least ten years older, and he seemed to be in some pain, though he did his best to conceal it. As I stared at him in astonishment, his head swivelled around and he looked at me, and nearly smiled.

“Lord Henry,” he said. “I see the English abroad remain as inescapable as ever.”

I could not find it in me to be wounded in the slightest. He asked after my health and whereabouts over the last few years, and when I told him that I had been travelling the continent, I felt an unfamiliar heat in my face. Was it shame, that I had fled when he remained and suffered? Shame is the moralist’s name for embarrassment, of course, and I suppose it was only natural. I hardly needed to ask after his recent history, though he offered that his wife had died in Italy, and that he had yet to see his sons. He said that he hoped to see them soon, though the look in his eyes suggested that it was a faint hope at best.

The waiter brought coffee then, and after a moment he said, “Twice now I have sent you into exile. No, you need not deny it; I do not hold it against you. The business with Queensberry I shall regret until the end. But though I do not regret the book that I wrote—there are matters in which I went too far.”

“In the matter of Basil, you most certainly did,” I said. I could not avoid a certain note of rancour, and he bowed his head slightly then in response. 

“In hindsight—yes, to play so obviously on the facts of the actual tragedy was far too simple a means by which to cause a sensation.” 

“A sensation,” I said, more in grief than in anger. “That is what you call that sordid imagining—murder compounded with sacrilege.”[4]

“It shocked, did it not? In that it was a success, but in other respects—ah.” He sighed heavily. “I quite liked Basil, you know, and Constance was very fond of him indeed. But what Dorian said—”

Here he broke off and shook his head slightly, then turned his attention to his coffee. But that slip—deliberate though it may have been—had caught my attention. “What do you mean, what Dorian said?”

“I mean it only in the most general sense,” he said, not quite looking at me. “He told me a great deal about poor Basil and his passion—his romance. And so when he vanished I could not help but imagine him being consumed in some way by the passions he never wanted to rule his life, consumed wholly, and I knew I must write something about it.” He paused and sat for a moment in thought, and I was briefly seized with a desire to shake him, ill-health or no. But then he continued. “I mentioned this notion in passing to Dorian one afternoon, and it was he who devised the entire scene in the attic in a moment. I was horrified, of course, but compelled—and I thought that such morbid imaginings could only come from a mind consumed with dread for a friend vanished without a trace, and with guilt for having not loved that friend enough. The first part of the book was written by then, and that terrible scene and its aftermath I crafted in a fever. And I think I must have still been in a fever when I sent it to _Lippincott’s_.”

It was certainly convincing, and there was nothing in it that I could seize upon as a falsehood. I knew Dorian had spent much time in Oscar’s company, between Basil’s disappearance and his own. But I could not shake a sense of disbelief that clung like spider-webs.

“Oscar,” I said, after a long moment of silence, “I do not accuse you of lying. And in any event, I admire a finely crafted lie as well as any scripture. But I must ask you, as simply as I may: do you know what happened to Basil? For somehow I feel certain that you do.”

“I do not,” he said, at last meeting my gaze quite directly. “I suspect, and I fear, and for better or for worse I have offered a fantastical sort of conjecture, but I do not know. The only person who would know is Dorian Gray.”

“Dorian Gray is dead,” I said, “Dead or vanished, as surely as Basil himself. It is a fine and easy thing to put an answer on someone who is gone.”

And then, to my surprise, Oscar shook his head. “I don’t think he is gone altogether, Harry. I would not be surprised if you or I saw him again someday.”

“You sound very certain,” I said.

“Do I? Then I must have my own deep doubts, for it is only by the firmest pronouncements that we may battle them.” He offered a sad half-smile then, and only in that moment did I feel the weight of time and exile as a Titan must feel the weight of the celestial spheres. I am not a fanciful person, but it seemed for a moment that the empty tables around us in the café were filled by shades.

We spoke of little things for a while after that, and then he left, in the company of Robert Ross. A year passed; I saw him once again from afar, and then I heard that he was dead.

  


***

[1] Charles Baudelaire, “Le mort des amants”. "The tarnished mirrors and the extinguished flames."

[2] _The Green Carnation_ , a satirical novel by Robert Hichens, published anonymously in 1894 and withdrawn from circulation in 1895. The characters “Esmé Amarinth” and “Lord Reginald Hastings” are clearly based on Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas. At one point, Wilde himself was suspected of having authored it, as was Ada Leverson, who had frequently satirised Wilde’s work for _Punch_. 

[3] Warren plainly feared that Wilde or his co-defendants would implicate him, leading to his own arrest. 

[4] Warren may be referring to Holland’s Catholic faith and the Catholic doctrine of the resurrection of the body, by which standard the utter destruction of Basil Hallward’s corpse in _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ may be seen as further exacerbating the sin of his murder.


	6. Afterword

In the complete manuscript of Lord Henry Warren’s memoir, Chapter 13—which covers his return to England following Wilde’s death and the subsequent decade—is untitled and fragmentary. It suggests that having expiated the shades of his “imperial” period, he could find very little to say about the years following his return from exile in 1901. It may be argued that Warren self-consciously fictionalizes and mythologizes himself in a Wildean pastiche, but we cannot know how much influence Wilde’s novel exerted on Warren’s imagination in his final years.

Warren died suddenly of a heart attack in the autumn of 1912, and is buried in Kensal Green cemetery in London. The case of Basil Holland’s disappearance remains unsolved to this day. Several of his works hang in the National Portrait Gallery and at the Tate Gallery. Both men remain overshadowed by their fictional counterparts. Outside of academia, few will recognize the names of Warren and Holland, but nearly everyone knows Lord Henry Wotton and Basil Hallward. A peculiar sort of afterlife, where fiction, legend, and truth continue to obscure one another in turn.

We are aware that the Warren manuscript, far from clarifying matters, in many cases obscures them further. Was “Dorian Gray” a single individual, or a composite of more than one? He lies at the center of the mystery, a paradox himself: so keenly observed in Wilde’s novel, and so curiously absent from any kind of historical record. Both he and his portrait remain elusive and unknowable, and they are almost invariably a disappointment when rendered in any visual medium. He is a kind of historical gravitational singularity, made visible only by bending of the light of words of others. The more poetic amongst us may say this is for the best; to bound such a person in the mundane details of a birth date, an address, a photograph, would be to destroy the enchantment of an enigma. Thus Dorian Gray joins the wit and the painter in the strange immortality of literature, which is one of the few true means of immortality, and the only place where a man may remain young and beautiful forever.

—The Editors

**Author's Note:**

> I am a terrible sucker for a number of things: Wildeana in general, the "what if Dorian Gray was a real person" trope that pops up every now and then, the Cuisinarting of fictional characters and actual history, imaginary scholarship, and metafiction. I hope the resulting strange brew here is an enjoyable one; in truth it's an idea I've been nursing for a while, and thegirlwiththemouseyhair's prompt was just the encouragement I needed to finally do something with it.
> 
> Lord Henry Warren, Basil Holland, and their families and intimates besides Wilde himself are, of course, total fictions; to the shade of Oscar Wilde I offer the deepest apologies for this fictional version of him. Other real-world references and name-checks: [John Gray](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gray_%28poet%29), [Lord Alfred Douglas](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Alfred_Douglas), [Charles Baudelaire,](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Baudelaire), [_Les fleurs du mal_](http://fleursdumal.org), [Constance Lloyd Wilde (later Holland)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constance_Lloyd), [Stéphane Mallarmé](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St%C3%A9phane_Mallarm%C3%A9), [Alfred Taylor](http://spartacus-educational.com/FWWtaylorAT.htm), [Walter Pater](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Pater), [John William Waterhouse](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_William_Waterhouse), [_The Green Carnation_](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24499), [the Marquess of Queensberry](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Douglas,_9th_Marquess_of_Queensberry), [Ada Leverson](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Leverson), and [Robert Ross](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbie_Ross). The rest is purest invention and pastiche.
> 
> I am indebted to: the scholarship of Wilfried Edener, Nicholas Frankel, and Joseph Bristow, which is summarized by Jörg Rademacher in ["Reflections on the history of The Picture of Dorian Gray"](http://oscholars-oscholars.com/may-i-say/rademacher-dorian-gray/), which compares the differences amongst the different texts of _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ ; [Big Finish Productions' _The Confessions of Dorian Gray_](http://www.bigfinish.com/ranges/released/the-confessions-of-dorian-gray), directed by Scott Handcock and starring Alexander Vlahos, one of my favorite versions of the "real Dorian Gray" trope; Dr C.L., whose course in _fin de siècle_ literature has stuck with me to this day; my friend and beta-reader Scribbles, whose advice, encouragement, and knowledge of Wildeana helped immensely in shepherding this work towards its completion; and of course my partner and cats, for their patience and support.  
> 


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